It seems almost no one is noticing how cash is being quietly killed off. Once it’s gone, your banks will have absurd amounts of power over you.
Stop being a contributor to the tyranny of convenience as described by Tim Wu, and (as a test) try paying everything in cash. Simulate for as long as you can the life of an unbanked person. And if you’re an activist, of course fight back in situations where cash is denied.
If you’re a small business owner, you should be making cash payments as convenient as card.
Indeed. Or even more so to balance out the cash-hostile shops. A local bar gives a 10% discount to cash payers, which I praise of course.
My local grocers have removed the cash payment option from the self checkout registers. Then on top of that, they seem to have some cashiers who are too lazy to carry a cash box to the cash register, so they open up “card only” lines, thus creating a slow cash payer line which is still shared with card payers. My response is to get in the card-only line, get all my stuff rung up, then pull out cash anyway, at which point the cashier must print out a special unpaid receipt, then I take that receipt to a cash register (skip the line) and pay it there. The idea is to tie up two cashiers and nick time from the card-only line so that the cash line does not have to take the time to ring up my stuff.